There's been much debate in recent days over whether or not the TTC should remodel its crumbling, 50s-era "bathroom tile" subway stations (since now they can). A vocal proponent of the renovation plan has been TTC Commissioner and Councillor Sandra Bussin, who thinks that the common masses aren't design-savvy enough to hold an opinion of much weight. "I come from an art background," she says, justifying her critical authority on the currently "boring" subway......

This evening, Toronto Culture and Fort York are unveiling a permanent public art installation under the Gardiner Expressway (off Fort York Boulevard, between Bathurst and Fleet Streets). In WATERTABLE, Toronto artists Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak use video and lights to create the effect of rippling water on the underside of the highway—a reminder that the Gardiner runs along what used to the original shoreline of Lake Ontario. Ever wonder why the the Toronto......

The verdict is in, and the umbrellas are going up! Following an invited competition to design a new public space for the Jarvis Slip, Waterfront Toronto has revealed the winner, unanimously chosen by the design jury: Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes Inc. As outlined in our competition coverage, the Cormier plan—dubbed "Sugar Beach"—will bring an HtO Park-style "urban beach" to the foot of Jarvis Street, dotted with charming steel umbrellas and Muskoka chairs. The sandy......

Moving insect legs! A dazzling shimmer wall! Faux beach, part deux! Waterfront Toronto has selected three proposals for the redevelopment of the Jarvis Street slip area, which currently features a dumpy, underutilized parking lot and not much else. Already part of the greater Waterfront Revitalization Plan, Lower Jarvis and Queen's Quay will soon be home to some new architecture (namely First Waterfront Place, the headquarters and studios of Corus Entertainment) and will be the......

Photo by Marc Lostracco. Deliberately confusing customers is big business in Canada, and fudging advertised prices with hidden fees is a hallmark of this particular circle of hell. Consumers can activate their cable television within a day, but can't cancel it without paying for the following month. Freestanding "independent" ATMs that are actually owned by big banks charge you an extra $1.50 "convenience" charge on top of what you'd pay at their regular ATM.......

While events like Luminato and Nuit Blanche are fantastic, Toronto is sorely lacking in quality, long-term public art. Last April, Henk Hofstra created an "urban river" in Drachten, Holland. The Blue Road installation is an example of what mind-blowing urban public art can be. Featuring 1000 metres of road painted blue and the phrase "Water is Life" written in eight-metre-high letters across it, the Blue Road is reminiscent of the waterway that used to be......

London's transit story of the week—if not the year—was Tuesday's re-opening of St. Pancras rail station after £800 million (that's $1.6 billion) of renovations. Not only does the station provide London with a new terminus for a high-speed 300km/h rail link to Paris and Brussels (with a planned stop at the 2012 Olympics site in east London along the way), but it also upgrades the city's regional and suburban rail connections and improves access......

Tomorrow night, November 2nd, a new CaseCamp-format un-conference will touch down in Toronto. Combining two sessions from the art community and one session from a related industry, ArtSmash is a unique speaker series that will generate a room full of creative ideas. The event is being coordinated by Ella Cooper and presented by the Emerging Arts Professional Network. Each speaker will be given 20 minutes to share a case study of a project they......

On your mark, get set, go register for Run The ROM! The 5km run is scheduled for May 12 and it’s the latest in the Run With Art series from The Movement Movement. The main movers of The Movement Movement, dancer/choreographer Jenn Goodwin and artist/curator Jessica Rose, are inviting the public to run laps of the museum for public art’s sake. You could be running through Ancient Peru or perhaps Heaven or Hell. Sounds exotic!......

Try as you might, you can't look anywhere in our city without seeing some sort of ad for Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista. Alongside an unusually aggressive advertising campaign through more traditional methods, the company also went all out and paid for an elaborate ice house in Dundas Square. As the corporation should have expected, the backlash towards the over-the-top promotion began almost right away: there were the obvious jokes about "freezing"; impromptu......

Each weekday morning, we pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve! Today's featured photographer is Michael's Way. The image above is taken from his collection of Toronto Public Art photos. It seems he went on a tour of our city's various outdoor sculptures and took the time to document each......

Back in 2002 artists Christie Pearson and Sandra Rechico decided to create wade, a series of public art installations in Toronto's many wading pools. With the help of YYZ Artists Outlet the the first wade project came to life in 2004. For one weekend Torontonians visited pools filled with blue jello, Dante inspired inflatable whales and many more pools re-imagined to make any number of artistic statements. It was a resounding success. The 2006 edition......

Peter Kuitenbrower writes about the Bloor St. Redesign in the National Post today. At first glance, the plan seems great, lots of trees, public art, better walkways for pedestrians and fewer parking spots. All good things if you want to make a more walkable neighbourhood. We were saddened to read that bike lanes were nowhere to be found in this plan. If the BIA and the City were planning to widen the sidewalk and take......

As part of Toronto’s Live With Culture initiative, an all-night party to celebrate contemporary art is scheduled to start this year on September 30 at 7:00pm and end on October 1 at 7:00am. The event is called the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche and is modeled after an annual Parisian festival that began in October of 2002 and has already spread to other cities such as Brussels, Rome, and Madrid. Private and public buildings will be......

The Toronto Star runs a profile on Rita Davies, Toronto's culture czar (actually the executive director of culture for the city) and touts her work as one of the reasons why Toronto's culture scene isn't just surviving but arguably thriving today. Inspiringly Davies also asks us to compare ourselves to other great cities like San Francisco, Milan and Chicago. Over the last decades Davies has fought for the arts and even created a 10-year......

Torontoist's favourite magazine about the city (sorry Toronto Life) is celebrating the launch of its fifth issue at the Arts and Letters Club this Thursday night (14 Elm St., 8pm, $10 includes a mag). The most exciting development over at Spacing is the fact that the new issue is in glorious colour, which fits the new issue's theme of public art. Torontoist got its hands on the new issue at Sunday's uTOpia book launch and......

The civic minded folks at Spacing magazine, Ryerson University and the University of Toronto have brought Wendy Radmacher Willis, executive director of the City Club of Portland to lecture at Innis Hall, 7:00 tonight. Since 1916 the City Club of Portland has advocated, fought for and raised issues of concern to the citizens of that little patch of civic sanity in the Pacific Northwest. The club tackles everything from education reform, the Patriot Act, social......

Torontoist doesn't usually have much reason to go up to the Sheppard Line or as we call it the "IKEA" line. But after hearing about the public art built in to the new stations of the Sheppard line, we decided to investigate. There's art at other TTC stations (Dupont and College comes to mind) and the work of people like Matt Blackett have made many of us see that even the utilitarian tile designs of......

The architects over at ERA are throwing a party for everyone's favourite local magazine about urban space, and everyone's favourite public art project that invites you to call a number to here various messages in different parts of the city. Yup, Spacing and Murmur will be feted at a Distillery Distric shindig replete with poetry performances by the city's poet laureate, a game called "Name That Toronto Intersection," and thousands of photographs by the city's......

Yesterday afternoon, in between alernating spurts of sunshine and rain, TOist ducked into Brassaii hoping to catch a glimpse of the Contact Photo exhibition and, especially, everybody's favourite Talking Head, David Byrne. Alas, we missed Byrne's lecture, but did show up in time to watch a very stylish- in an high tech Prada-clad cyclist way- Byrne ride off into the sunset with his adorable (and young) female companion. About 20 minutes later, deciding to......

TOist loves Spacing like a fat kid loves cake. So the kid is in the sweet shop, and TOist is over the moon because tonight the mag presents Public Space Invaders, 'an evening of short films focused on transit, public art installations, monster homes, surveillance cameras, urban exploration and city life in public space,' at the Draconian. We're curious to see what the piece entitled TTC will be all about.......